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1.05.2016

It's crazy how fast time flies when you are trying to prepare your life for another human being to exist in the world. That said, I'm now 36 weeks pregnant. How did that happen? It seems like I was 9 weeks along and just telling our family yesterday. With holidays beyond us it seems like December never happened. In reality, December flew by all the while I sober drove my husband and an assortment of other people to every event I would normally have consumed multiple bottles of wine for. Wine. {sigh}

People write all the time about "the things no one tells you" or "what you didn't know about being pregnant". This isn't one of those. This is more along the lines of me explaining the completely logical things you knew would happen, but from my personal experience. No wine, lots of bad food, weird body changes you never fully considered, and some mood swings that make you seem more like Sybil than you'd like to admit.

I mean you know you'll gain weight, duh... But did you know that you would have an obsession with pie and many other creations by Betty Crocker? I didn't. In fact pie wasn't even in my top 3 dessert choices until I was pregnant. The order previously was ice cream, cupcakes, cake balls. Boom. When newly preggo I'd often put a small pillow in my shirt to envision how this belly might look down the road. So cute right? Turns out the tiny pillow insert does not account for your ass spreading, your boobs becoming water balloons, and your hands and feet looking like a sumo wrestlers. Put all this in the woes department. Mistruths you convince yourself of in the beginning become a distant memory by 36 weeks.

In my mind I could totally only gain 20 lbs and have a cute little basketball bump with no other crazy expansion elsewhere. Incorrect. Pie is amazing and readily available during the holidays. Enter 30 lbs later, and counting, with 4 weeks left. Oopsie. Despite my initially surprise of the breech of a weight I never anticipated seeing, I also felt this little nugget move. File that in the amazingly whoa category. I was laying in Pure Barre finishing abs and felt this weird little flutter that I couldn't believe. She was already like "mom, why are we doing abs? I'm trying to just lay here." A girl after my own heart from the start.

Aside from weight changes and cravings for sweets and carbs only, there are many other things I thought about, but didn't really think about in detail like... having no clothes that fit. In the beginning your belly pops out a little in the daytime as you eat, but overnight reduces back down to what appears to be normal.This should allow you to wear your pants with a tunic or slowly move to maternity wear. Then suddenly one morning you wake up and your belly pop did not descend. And you're all wait... what happened here? Cue wearing your husbands sweater so you can go buy larger clothes. Finding maternity wear is a whole category of woe that I never considered in great detail. I thought it would be simple, and maybe fun? Untrue. I gathered a few pairs of maternity pants from Jessica Simpson's line I've been happy with because those models appear to actually be pregnant. The 6 foot tall models on other websites, with a tiny pillow insert as mentioned above in their shirt, are not in fact pregnant. Therein the problem lies. I'm a little over 5 feet so gravity and torso space are already not in my favor. I would receive these maternity dresses in the mail and look like a squatty gnome with a donut for a belly button. Yes. Although your belly button is now disappearing before your eyes, it can magically take the shape of a giant donut under your clothing. Once you see it then you're thinking about donuts and have to task yourself a reminder to get donuts later. Damn it.

Ultimately, I resolved to buying larger normal human clothes vs maternity wear. Exception with pants of course because maternity pants have a giant waist band that are freaking amazing. I may never wear regular pants again, definitely not for thanksgivings going forward at least. H&M had a great assortment of loose dress options that were inexpensive and made me feel like I had a little style mixed with my bump. Buy the larger size and don't look back ladies. I also invested in several high waist pants from Lululemon. Equally amazing and they make you feel really good about yourself. Don't look at the price tag, make it a double pair purchase, and pretend it never happened. I have lived in the high waist 7/8 Lulus from workouts to daytime to nights out as if they were real pants. Well worth it.

This is is H&M... not maternity... but a size 12. {gulp}

Working out while pregnant seemed like nothing in the beginning. You're still kind of a normal size maybe just flabby looking in the middle. This made me way more self conscious than I ever expected. I guess I thought my bump would be immediately firm as soon as it started to form. Wrong again. Your bump takes more of the shape of dunlap for way longer than is fair for any woman. For me, it was about 24-25 weeks before my bump was firm enough to look like I was actually pregnant and not just eating pie daily. Although less pie might have helped the issue. Anyway, I'd go to Pure Barre and felt like the women around me had to be thinking "This girl has been coming for months and is only getting larger and less toned. Maybe this is not the workout I thought it was?" So eventually I invested in some PB socks that read "baby on board". This way everyone knew I was in fact pregnant and not some Pure Barre anomaly who's body rejects isometric movement and in turn bloats like a dead jelly fish. Pure Barre has been one of the things I tried to stay with religiously while pregnant until the last few weeks. In my mind I would do the sets of movement and think to myself "If I can't do this tuck for 30 more seconds I surely can't push medium sized ham from my lady parts." Surprisingly motivating thought process in class. The workout allowed me to do what I could and feel good without straining myself while keeping fit. My doctor mentioned numerous times that it will be super helpful in helping me bounce back post baby. Win. Win. I will likely try to take a few more classes, with the pregnancy modifications, before tiny human arrives.

Tiny human. To be honest it was hard to even imagine her being a real person until I knew she was a she. Michael and I debated back and forth numerous times on what we thought our babe would be. He of course thought boy and I a girl. I for some reason just felt from the beginning that 'she' and I were together all the time... Driving around, running errands, working, whatever. When we finally went at 16 weeks to find out she would be our girl I couldn't contain my excitement. I literally burst into tears when they said our girl was coming. Not being a big cryer this really surprised Michael and myself. Once I got it under control and we could focus on her name that made everything so real. Not only was she a girl... She was OUR girl. She would always be ours and we would always be hers. Whoa. Incredible whoa. Now she is Elliott Grace and in 4 weeks or less we will meet her, finally. I can't wait to know who she will look like and what color her eyes will be and if she will have hair. So many wonderful whoas!

Other weird things I didn't consider that fall into woes... Your body is going through some intense hormone changes and prepping to move a human being out into the world. Duh. But there are some odd side effects I never heard of like congestion. I have been congested for about 4 months solid. The introduction of a sinus and respiratory infection on top of that made me determine I would soon smother in my sleep. So I got a zpack and some mucinex and things have vastly improved. {For any new age moms who want to plague me with hate for my medication consumption while pregnant, you can keep the comments to yourself or shove it. In return, I'll keep my opinions to myself on you breast feeding your child to age 7 and not having them vaccinated, but likely still insisting you should send them to public school. Thanks for that.}

Next on the list... Carpal tunnel. Did you know that you can develop carpal tunnel while pregnant? Me either. Not ideal for a hair and makeup artist. So now I wear super cool wrist guards at night that make my hands smell like feet. Imagine wrist guards + 3-5 bathroom breaks a night and barely being able to wield your enormous pie eating body out of bed to make it to the bathroom. The result?

Insomnia. Call me anytime between 3am-5am. I am generally awake then. They say it's preparing you for baby's new schedule for feeding. Maybe so. Feeding. A phrase I wasn't ready for in breast feeding class... Nipple damage. I'll leave it at that.

Any other Mommas to be out there with weird instances they've experienced... I'd love to hear them. Unless they involve tragic birth stories, horrifying tears, blood loss, explosions or the like. Save those tales for post child birth. My last woe of pregnancy is that as soon as you tell someone you're pregnant they're all "oh girl, let me tell you this story about my cousins neighbor, she ended up with a vajanus." Wait what? Yes. People love to share horrific tales of birth that make you want to cry. As a glutton for things like that, I listen wide eyed to every detail and imagine myself sitting on a inflatable donut for the foreseeable future. Donuts. Hmmm.

Finally, my most unexpected, happy part of this process, and my final WHOA is the incredible amount of LOVE people radiate to you when you are pregnant. Thank you to all our friends and family for the incredible support and out pouring of joyful love for our little person. From showers, nursery prep, sweet notes, texts, and surprise gifts at our door we are truly overwhelmed by how special you have made this time for us. WHOA, THANK YOU.

So ladies, I'm sure there will be a labor woes and whoas post at some point down the road. Until then... Happy 2016 and keep us in your prayers!